iTunes and Ableton Live

Ok, on our quest to find the Nirvana environment of keeping track of material, for example for DJ use, I tried out the latest Albeton Live 6.0 (b15), and the brand new iTunes 7.0.

This new iTunes is nice as it has now an option to make and select multiple iTunes libraries, hit down the option key when starting iTunes via the icon and you will notice the new dialog box for this option. It means that you could finally have multiple iTunes libraries, one for your DJ collection, one for your listening use (such as Schubert music), and so forth.

Also, now in Ableton Live 6.0 you could drag from iTunes files directly into the audio tracks. So I did this, works fine.

Now, some issues with this. You can’t directly get the .asd files (have not tried to place those inside the original location), with the autowarping, it didn’t seem to find any .asd warp changes. So it’s like doing an auto-warp each and every time, and any tuned .asd files are not used. Ack.

Secondly, if you want to use .als clip collections, which I think it’s the way I will use Ableton from now, that’s not doable, either.

Also, you need a lot of screen estate to have both Ableton Live and iTunes running, at the same time.

That’s really sad, as iTunes has excellent capabilities for sorting and arranging song sets, including playlists and global searches, so that part can’t be used for this kind of workflow operations.